Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

A review requested by Diego Santa Maria, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! One will from time to time come across a film for which one tangibly lacks the […]

A review requested by Coco, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It should be no surprise when a movie titled The Milk of Sorrow turns out to be unrelentingly bleak, but the film’s opening minutes are shattering beyond anything one could be prepared for: over black, we hear […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16 & 10/19World premiere: 23 September, 2012, San Sebastian International Film Festival Part of me wants to eschew convention and not bother with any kind of synopsis for The Cleaner, the first feature by Peruvian writer-director Adriana Saba; and I will not indulge in this wish only because I am […]

There’s a lazy critical shorthand that goes thusly: “Movie X is like Disparate Element A meets Disparate Element B!” It is a contemptible way to reduce movies to their most superficial elements, playing as little more than the writer’s way of proving his superior knowledge of art history. Lazy and contemptible or not, I’m about […]

Here’s a weird little film: the Spanish/Peruvian coproduction Madeinusa, by first-time writer/director Claudia Llosa. What starts out looking like an ethnographic story of the religious customs of a town in the back of beyond in Peru turns, rather quickly, into a mash-up between Twin Peaks and The Wicker Man. The story is immaterial: it is […]